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Donald Trump, 60 Minutes, and Global Warming

Earlier this week, Leslie Stahl and 60 Minutes got into the subject of global warming with President Trump.

Her question, “Do you still think climate change is a hoax” followed background on recent hurricanes Michael, Florence, Maria, and Harvey.

The President’s response was “I think something’s happening. Something’s changing and it’ll change back again. I don’t think it’s a hoax, I think there’s probably a difference. But I don’t know that it’s manmade.”

This is a huge walk-back from his old rhetoric, which was enough to make scientists like me cringe.

And in the context of hurricanes, his comment is also is consistent with what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) said in its September 20 statement titled “Global Warming and Hurricanes”: “In the Atlantic, it is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on hurricane activity.”

It is noteworthy that GFDL’s statement was in an update, and that “Global Warming and Hurricanes” has said the same about Atlantic hurricanes for years, long predating the Trump Administration.

Stahl then went on to Greenland. Here’s the relevant transcript:

Lesley Stahl: I wish you could go to Greenland, watch these huge chunks of ice just falling into the ocean, raising the sea levels.

President Donald Trump: And you don’t know whether that would have happened with or without man. You don’t know.

Another reasonable response. For reasons having nothing to do with humans, ice-covered areas in Greenland endured 6,000 years of warming centering around 118,000 years ago that, in terms of integrated heating, was larger than anything humans can do to it. Yet it only lost about 30% of its ice. There were certainly more “huge chunks of ice just falling into the ocean raising sea levels” back then, with no human influence on climate.

It’s also true that the current high-latitude north polar warming is largely (but not completely) consistent with global warming theory.

Finally, they got into a “he said, he said” discussion about climate scientists’ various viewpoints. Here’s how it ended:

Lesley Stahl: Yeah, but what about the scientists who say it’s worse than ever?

President Donald Trump: You’d have to show me the scientists because they have a very big political agenda, Lesley.

Lesley Stahl: I can’t bring them in.

President Donald Trump: Look, scientists also have a political agenda.

No, 60 Minutes cannot be expected to bring in hundreds of scientists on either side of this debate to investigate whether or not they have a political agenda. But Al Gore may have been on to something in his comments on the recent UN report claiming temperature increases of a mere 0.6°C will be catastrophic. He said it was “torqued up a little bit, appropriately – how [else] do they get the attention of policy-makers around the world”[?].